"Jolly Readers Along to the Edge of a Cliff": A Conversation with Kate McIntyre
No contemporary writer leaves me quite as terrified yet delighted as Kate McIntyre. As a fan of her wickedly witty and imaginative fiction, I’m in good company. Roxane Gay selected Mad Prairie: Stories and a Novella (University of Georgia Press, October 2021) for the Flannery O’Connor Award, and the book was longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Prize. Gay calls the collection “elegantly linked,” its characters “utterly original,” and promises “the intelligence, humor, and charm of these eight stories will stay with you long after you turn this marvelous collection’s final page.”
From my vantage, McIntyre does what I want to do better and more strangely than I could imagine. We’re both writers influenced by early Gothic fiction—Ann Radcliff’s Gothic terror; “Monk,” Lewis’s Gothic horror; Mary Shelley’s Gothic sci-fi—and any reader of Gothic fiction knows it’s dangerous to seek forbidden knowledge. Similarly, as McIntyre peels back the layers of “Midwestern nice” to reveal the power structures beneath compulsory politeness, her characters learn that recognition of one’s place in a breathtakingly unequal system comes at a steep—if not lethal—price: A folksy-talking Kansan politician parlays a devastating mining accident into national notoriety, an entrepreneurial jam-maker realizes too late that her unemployed husband has tasked their young sons with building a moat around their rural home.
McIntyre’s settings work to evoke both the sublime tension of extremes (mines, moats, tunnels, and turrets) and dream-like, uncanny surrealism, moving from a vast ocean of tentacled and tightly-rooted prairie grass, an undulating and open psychic space, to the glittering Atlantic Ocean of the collection’s “Coda.” A master of plot, pacing, and the uncanny effect, she sneakily turns up the heat until the frog knocks about the pot at a rolling boil.
McIntyre and I corresponded via email about her collection. We discussed tragicomedy, free indirect discourse, tapping into arcane energies, and satisfying symmetry.
Wendy Oleson: At Split Lip Magazine we like to say we’re “totally bonkers-in-love with voice-driven writing.” Mad Prairie gives us that in spades (as in shovels-full of good Kansan dirt from a sharp-bladed spade). During a post-reading Q&A, I heard you talking about voice coming “relatively second nature” to you, that when you think of a character, you “know how they sound.” In my own work, adopting a first-person narrator often feels like a shortcut to voice-driven writing, so it struck me when you said you do a lot of work to cut the expected distance of third person to provide the intimacy of first person, that if you drop tags that indicate we’re in the character’s mind (“she thought,” for instance), you can get right up on the character. Could you talk more about your use of free indirect speech/discourse—how it works in particular stories or how it became important (through influences or trial and error) to your style and craft?
Kate McIntyre: I had a brilliant professor in my MFA at Oregon State University, Marjorie Sandor, who pointed out how frequently I use free indirect discourse. That was the moment I became conscious of this facet of my writing. I’d always written in third person and cheated it, so the distance between the narrator and the character shrinks. I suspect that this impulse has to do with my resistance to talking about myself—a Midwestern aversion. I’ve never been able to keep a journal because it feels too self-conscious, too self-indulgent. This is my own neurosis—journaling is great for working out thoughts and everyone should do it.
I like how free indirect discourse can jolly readers along to the edge of a cliff. You get readers to agree with a few things the narrator/character thinks, then they’re hooked. Once you’ve earned that trust, you can push boundaries, testing how far you can go without the readers turning on you. It creates wonderful tension in a narrative, as readers question exactly what the character might be capable of. I have a few favorite moments in the collection where I feel I got this dynamic right. For example, “A New Man” is told from the close third person point of view of a woman in a loveless marriage to a boorish fellow—insensitive, casually cruel, bigoted. He receives a lung transplant and is a terrible patient. At first, we are firmly on the wife’s side. But eventually, we realize a few things: that the transplanted lung is slowly taking over his personality, that the protagonist is glad, and further, that she is not providing adequate post-operative care to her very ill husband. When the transplanted lung eventually inflates the husband like a balloon and lifts him away across the prairie, the protagonist is simply relieved. For readers, I hope, the feelings are more fraught—horror at her husband’s living death, guilt at how we rooted for her while she acted cruelly, and also, just a touch of satisfaction because, after all, he wasn’t a very nice man. (Was he?)
WO: The comedy of the collection is coupled with tragedy. When the characters laugh, it is not mirthful laughter but mania and hysteria, devastation, and desperation to belong; in fact, there’s a great deal of “honking”—is it laughing or crying or being obnoxious?—from machines and humans. Speaking of that union between the comic and tragic, can you talk a bit about naming in your work? Your characters and places have names that are interesting and evocative, particularly in the novella where we get Tuxton, Jericho Jungnickel, Principal Kalt, Karl Scharf, Mrs. Sheldrake, and Scharf Industries and Durftig Farms, the corporations Principal Kalt insists “take such good care of us… like loving parents.” There’s something really playful and fun about this. I found myself wondering, does this push the envelope of serious literary fiction or is this a gift of our postmodern sensibilities?
KM: Thank you for noticing the names! Firstly, the names are little jokes to reward alert readers. While we wait until near the end of “Culvert Rising” to learn that two characters are actually the same person, translations of their names provide an early clue. Also, I’ve always gotten a kick out of Charles Dickens’ character names—Orlick, Noggs, Radfoot, Jingle, Heep. I like the idea that names can tell you not just something about your character but setting and milieu. In my favorite story by Annie Proulx, “The Half-Skinned Steer,” characters are called Tick Corn, Mero, Rollo, Bob Kitchen, and Tin Head. These names strain believability, but they also are of the place—drought-plagued, hardscrabble, Wyoming ranch country. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s “This Blessed House,” which is grounded firmly in realism, a nickname functions similarly: The dazzling Twinkle, whose given name is Tanima, charms everyone except her beleaguered, endlessly practical husband Sanjeev, who would never possess something so frivolous as a nickname. In the names you mention, we can see Christian faith (Jericho) and Germanic heritage (Jungnickel, Kalt, Scharf).
You’re absolutely right that there’s danger in this playful approach to naming. I encourage my workshop students to keep readers immersed in the story—John Gardner’s continuous “fictive dream” gets interrupted each time the artifice of the story pops into view, like a stray lighting rig at a play. And I think this is generally solid advice.
WO: In “Culvert Rising,” Miriam, a schoolteacher, sees herself as a “community leader” and “part of the fabric of the place, even if it was the extreme far frayed edge, shut in a car door, dragged for miles.” She decides to take on a special project to bolster the morale of the town and settles on a maypole, which represents “the permeability of the boundary between the earth and the heavens. Certain spots in the world blurred the real and unreal, living and dead.” I began seeing “Culvert Rising” as the maypole of this collection and the maypole as evoking the sublime. Could you talk about the way the collection and its linkages blur the real and unreal, living and dead (and maybe even your original inspiration for the May Pole)?
KM: My parents collected antiques, so I grew up with a cobbler’s bench in the living room, a railroad master’s desk in the dining room, and an apple-picker’s ladder in the stairway (the only place it fit). Our house was built in 1993. In grade school a friend visited, and after studying the various objects and collections, said, “Your house is so new but it looks so old.” On top of the pie safe in the entryway was the Diamond Dye cabinet, a wooden box with a tin lithograph on the front depicting nineteenth century schoolchildren wrapping thick ribbons around a tall pole. The art was colorful and weird, so it captured my attention. The pole was a maypole. My dad passed away last year, and the cabinet was auctioned off, along with the cobbler’s bench, the railroad master’s desk, and the apple-picker’s ladder. Antiques don’t fetch much on the market these days—not much more than when my parents bought the items in the eighties.
In “Culvert Rising,” Miriam grieves the sudden loss of her own parents. She badly wants to believe that a connection exists between earth and the heavens, the living and the dead. I’d read more about maypoles—their possible symbolism as the axis mundi, a place where states of being and nonbeing might meet and even overlap. This complicated the advertising image on the Diamond Dye cabinet—the dancing youths were not simply celebrating a rite of spring but, perhaps unknowingly, tapping into arcane energies.
Miriam learns about this history of the maypole too and enlists the students she teaches to perform a dance at the closest equivalent the school has to a maypole—a tetherball pole. She intends to use the students to bridge the gap between life and death; she’s not thinking particularly clearly at this point in the narrative due to poisoning by environmental toxins. She pitches the event to the community as pageant equivalent to a school play. As for many characters in the collection, careful, even obsessive planning yields unforeseen outcomes. The children mark the way a maypole resembles a funeral pyre and how a human body might be bound to the pole by the bright ribbons. The connection between life and death is forged in a way Miriam never intended, but ultimately welcomes.
WO: I’ve heard you can knit a pair of socks while you’re reading—not listening to but reading on the page—a mystery novel. Do you see a direct relationship between what you’re drawn to as a reader and what you’re writing? How do carefully plotted mystery novels shape your sense of structure?
KM: I’ve stopped with socks because you must knit two of them and they must fit! Scarves only these days, at a rate of one scarf every two years. Most nights though, as I fall asleep, I listen to a Golden Age mystery on audiobook. I love when things click neatly into place—lipstick caps, keys in locks, plots. I try to give my stories’ endings that same satisfying closure. Literature should resemble life, more or less, so it can say something about life. And life is so messy—unpredictable, random, hard. But I believe that in the same way dialogue in fiction is a distillation of normal speech, plot can present a more concentrated version of events, one in which echoes of elements create satisfying symmetry.
At the end of each Golden Age mystery novel, in the last twenty pages or so, the detective shows how all the disparate elements “add up.” Reading a mystery is like ironing: You start with a wrinkled, ungainly mess that gradually resolves, through time and persistence, into a smooth surface. The impossible questions are answered neatly and the suggestion that the rules of the world no longer apply is dismissed. With enough creative thinking by the detective, the laws of physics are upheld: A person cannot levitate across a beach to commit murder (Dorothy L. Sayers) or traverse a snowy path without leaving a print (G. K. Chesterton) or enter and exit a room locked from the inside (Edgar Allan Poe, in one of the very earliest detective stories). Similarly, in my short stories, I want a hidden logic to emerge by the end, even as plots push into the literary fantastic. In the novella I mention above, “Culvert Rising,” this happens in a few ways: Miriam’s plan to make contact with the great beyond is successful, but it arrives in new forms: a tornado and a funeral pyre.
WO: This collection is scary-smart thematically, emotionally, artistically, creatively. It is, to my heart and mind, extraordinarily good—but I’m still going to ask, why do you write fiction?
KM: I love this question. Why indeed? For me, maybe the answer is to see the world more clearly. I am angry much of the time, about inequalities in systems, abuses of power, needless suffering silently endured by good people who don’t believe they deserve better, who waste their precious time on louts who contribute nothing and take everything. But how do we imagine different paths, other lives, methods of escape? One of my very favorite writers, Muriel Spark, said, “I aim to startle as well as to please,” and that strikes me as a neat summary of my project too. I hope that my writing is a wedge that pries up the boulder of reality—so firm, so seemingly fixed—to grant a view of the things crawling underneath. Grotesque, yes, but also so lively. So full of new possibility.
Kate McIntyre’s (@_katemcintyre) debut story collection, Mad Prairie, was selected by Roxane Gay as the winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in journals including Electric Literature, Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, the Cincinnati Review, and Copper Nickel, and she has a Notable Essay in Best American Essays and Special Mentions in two Pushcart Prize anthologies. She’s an assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she helps edit the speculative flash journal hex (hexliterary.com).
Wendy Oleson (@weoleson) is the author of two award-winning prose chapbooks, Please Find Us (Gertrude Press) and Our Daughter and Other Stories (Map Literary). Her fiction and poetry appear in dozens of venues, including Denver Quarterly, Passages North, Copper Nickel, Best of the Net 2018, and SmokeLong Quarterly: Best of the First Ten Years. Wendy serves as managing editor for Split Lip Magazine and associate prose editor for Fairy Tale Review. She lives in Walla Walla, Washington. Find her at www.wendyoleson.com